*Editor’s Note: All paintings are acrylic on canvas and were completed from 2024-2025
Since April 2023, a civil war has been raging in Sudan between two rival factions of the country’s military government: the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), an army of the internationally recognized Sudanese government, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). This war has forcibly displaced nearly twelve million people both inside Sudan and across its borders, making it one of the largest displacement crises in recent history.
In November 2023, Yasmeen Saeed was eight months pregnant with her first child when she and her husband made the painful decision to flee Omdurman (the second largest city in Sudan, on the west side of the Nile River and across from Khartoum) and travel three hours by car to Shendi, a small city in northern Sudan. Yasmeen has extended family in Shendi. Leaving behind all but the bare minimum of personal items in their Omdurman apartment, the couple arrived in Shendi exhausted, anxious, and fearful about Yasmeen’s chances of giving birth in a safe and clean hospital. Many hundreds of civilians had fled to Shendi for refuge from the fighting in Khartoum, and the small township in northern Sudan was bursting at the seams with the newly displaced.
Yasmeen Abdalah Ahmed Saeed
Two weeks after arriving in Shendi, and one month before her expected due date, Yasmeen’s water broke and she went into labor. Over our Zoom conversations, she described the dreadful conditions of the clinic she was rushed to—no electricity, bad water, crowds of patients, and few doctors. She had to undergo a cesarean because of extreme stress related to her uncertain new situation, but her son was born in good health. With her husband’s support, and her parents nearby, Yasmeen was able to recover in their makeshift village home.
Within six months of their arrival in Shendi, Yasmeen and her husband believed it safer to attempt fleeing Sudan than to remain as the tensions from the conflicts were increasing by the day. Weeks passed without the correct paperwork to exit Sudan. Finally receiving their proper visas but having to leave her parents behind, her husband drove them, and his mother and sister, the thirteen hours to Port Sudan. It was there that they all boarded a plane to Oman. Since the Spring of 2024, they have resided in Muscat, the capital of Oman and its largest city.
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Saeed’s painting style eludes easy definition. Describing her work as figurative is both accurate yet inadequate. While figures are central to each painting, they are marked by anonymity, reflecting a symbolic narrative referring obliquely to enemy soldiers usurping homes, the fears of impending loss and, in the haunting work Memory Is a Sealed Box Only Opened by Longing, dreams of safety and peace.
Memory Is a Sealed Box Only Opened by Longing
The light in Saeed’s paintings is not the atmospheric light of more traditional painting. It is neither warm nor enveloping. Rather, a harsh luminosity anchors each work—an unnatural light that illuminates the scenes as if we were watching a play unfold with unfamiliar characters signaling their story. Saeed’s interest in women’s issues and the elusive interiority of women and young girls caught in the web of wartime is reflected in two paintings: They Put Me in a Pot and Told Me To Adapt and the sad lament of There Is No Secret in My Body at Night Except What I Waited for and What I Lost. Both paintings convey through an eerie dark palette and sharp linear drawing, the longing and sorrow of being stuck in circumstances beyond one’s control. The embedded feminist cries within these titles are evident—in different ways than men, women endure a particular dislocation and pain from the fallout of civil war. Saeed told me that furniture in her paintings—chairs, tables, beds— symbolize a witnessing to history both personal and universal. Material objects containing truths that may never come to light.
Mary Behrens
Visual Arts Editor
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There Is No Secret in My Body at Night Except What I Waited for and What I Lost
They Put Me in a Pot and Told Me To Adapt
To The Enemy Who Drinks Tea in the Hut
Layers of Truth
He Is Calm and So Am I
The War Will End and the Leaders Will Shake Hands
All This Light Belongs to Me
Surrounded By the Unspoken
A Truce with Time
Code To Survival
Beyond the Distant Autumn
Yasmeen Saeed
Yasmeen Abdalah Ahmed Saeed is a 2014 graduate of the University of Sudan in Khartoum where she received a BA in painting. Her works have since been exhibited in Europe, Sudan, and across the Middle East. In 2025 she was among sixty international artists invited to Spain for The Pontevedra Biennial.
